Header photo credit: peeterv / Getty Images (via Canva Pro). A residential area of Lagos, Nigeria.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Patience Adzande conducts a focus group discussion in Maiduguri, Nigeria, as part of her fieldwork.

The difficulties of drawing the line between us and our informants also relate to the aftermath of data collection, through the resonance and impact of various life stories. Critical safeguarding issues arise here, particularly where the research undertaking is liable to potentially generate backlash for the research participants. The challenges posed by research – outside of our responsibility to “do no harm” – also concern our ability to deal with the nature of information shared with us and to process the stark differences defining our lives and those of our study subjects, as individuals and communities. While this may be more pronounced when working with people who are particularly disadvantaged economically, the weight of sitting through accounts of trauma related to war, displacement or gender-based violence is equally impactful.

It is therefore essential for researchers to recognise and declare their commitment to taking all necessary steps to prevent harm from resulting to their research participants. In addition, the potential impact of the research process on the researcher, especially during and after data collection, should be adequately considered. Researchers must give these issues adequate forethought before engaging in their research undertakings and make ethical decisions on how or whether to conduct their proposed research.

Navigating issues associated with researching disadvantaged people

While there are no definitive answers to the issues raised here – or to the many other questions left unaddressed – it is important to acknowledge their existence and engage with the persistent presence of discomfort that surrounds the data collection process. One way of navigating this discomfort is to approach research subjects as “human lives” and not just data, and to design methodologies around exchange rather than extraction. This may be instinctively done by conducting interviews and FGDs as reciprocal conversations, while maintaining boundaries and recognising the power configurations that shape our positionality in relation to informants and the knowledge and experiences they share.

Building on the need to integrate reciprocity into the process, another approach could be to engage in more participatory research. This would also require validation sessions with study participants through follow-up fieldwork. Sharing research findings with individuals and communities – in a language accessible to them – would allow them an insight into the research process beyond the interview and FGD setting. It would also enable them to observe how raw data is processed through sharing findings via presentations and publishable outputs.

Takeaway insights and lessons learnt

Regardless of the particular strategies we chose in navigating the intricacies of research with and on disadvantaged peoples, honesty and transparency are central in ensuring that our roles are clearly defined and that informants’ have realistic expectations of us. Through building authenticity into our interactions with informants, we may become better equipped at setting targets that acknowledge the lengthy journey to impact through publications. At the same time, we can challenge the normative nature of research as extraction, by critically reflecting on our relationship with our research participants and adopting more inclusive approaches to data collection.

This blog post is a joint output based on discussions that took place as part of a seminar the authors attended on 31 January 2023, at The University of Manchester, entitled “Doing research with and on disadvantaged peoples”.

Photo credits: Patience Adzande, taken on fieldwork in Maiduguri, Nigeria, August 2022.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Miriam Maina, Farouk Braimah, Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Alphonce G. Kyessi, Joseph Macarthy, Evance Mwathunga, Basirat A. Oyalowo, Ansumana Tarawally, Abdulai Turay and Ola Uduku

ACRC housing domain researchers in Accra, Dar es Salaam, Freetown, Lagos and Lilongwe reflect on how increasing fuel costs have affected housing and construction ecosystems in ACRC research cities, and how these have in turn affected the lives of low-income households.

Analysts have highlighted the humanitarian crisis in Africa resulting from the Russia–Ukraine war, as well as spillover effects on the world’s economy, which was on a slow recovery following the Covid-19 pandemic. There have been short-term impacts on food and energy prices because of disruption to global trade and supply chains and these have been further impacted by tightened financial conditions, due to rising investment uncertainty.

Changes in fuel and energy prices have affected housing in many ways, through increased goods and building materials’ prices, a rise in transportation costs, and reduced employment opportunities in construction for labourers and local artisans. These, coupled with high costs of food and basic commodities, continue to deepen poverty and inequality and exacerbate housing conditions for low-income urban residents.

Making difficult choices

On average, informal settlement residents could spend 15–30% of their monthly budget on construction materials, relying on a range of income and financing options. Where costs of fuel have impacted on transportation and material costs, households have no option but to prioritise other needs, and forego house maintenance.

A diesel price hike, being the major fuel used by trucks and delivery vans, has significantly increased the costs of major building materials like granite, sharp sand, plaster sand, cement, reinforcement bars, etc… There are skilled workers, such as carpenters, plumbers, bricklayers (masons) within the community, who are willing to work on credit, but these would also need funds to buy the essential building materials needed for the improvement works.

– Basirat Oyalowo, Lagos housing researcher

Households are forced to make difficult choices and compromises on how to adjust limited household budgets to cover food, transportation and home improvement needs. In the case of housing, a household might be forced to decide between postponing or extending the gaps between home improvement, or reducing the construction standards, or cutting the costs of artisans, or simply to forego house improvement.

Unless maintenance in the homes become a necessity, people living in informal settlements are not willing to bear the cost of maintaining their houses in these times.

– Farouk Braimah, Accra housing researcher

Researchers in Dar es Salaam and Lilongwe observed a deceleration in construction activity across most housing markets, including informal and low-income neighbourhoods. As Ansumana Tarawally, a housing researcher from Freetown, noted in another interview, a decline in construction activity creates conditions for overcrowding, since more residents continue to move into urban areas, and especially into informal and low-income settlements.

Rising energy costs also affect daily household choices. Families relying on kerosene or paraffin for cooking, are forced to use charcoal or firewood, which are cheaper. This has a direct polluting effect on the local climate and on longer-term sustainability goals, as it further depletes local forests of timber.

I recall a resident in Lilongwe’s Mchesi Area, a youthful young lady probably in her early 20s, a supervisor in a concrete block-making business. In her own words, she said: “I can tell you, business is very difficult these days… Our everyday life is characterised by frequent blackouts or load shedding. The energy situation has forced my boss to buy a gen set. Consequently, we are spending a lot on fuel to run the machine. This also means scaling down on production. In the end, our wages are cut down, since the business cannot sustain us”.

– Evance Mwathunga, Lilongwe housing researcher

The intersection of global climate and energy crises has had far-reaching effects on many aspects of global and national economies. Increased fuel prices, however, reach “beyond the pump”, affecting the housing, construction and livelihood options of residents, and significantly shifting local economies. These effects are severely felt in the housing and living conditions of the most vulnerable residents of cities of the global South, who were already experiencing multiple vulnerabilities.

I think looking at such topics will give insight to city authorities to understand the realities around the poor housing condition in an informal settlement and develop strategies to salvage the situation. I consider this a roadmap to solving one of the most persistent problems that informal settlement dwellers have been battling all their lives.
– Abdulai Turay, Freetown research assistant

Households – already struggling to balance limited financial resources with their food, transportation, and savings and investment activities – are forced to forego incremental housing improvement and continue to live in poor housing. With fewer households investing in incremental house construction and maintenance, housing conditions are worsening, exposing households to greater health and environmental risks. There is need for local and global housing action to recognise and address these trends, involving government authorities, as well as those in the construction industry and building materials sectors.

Contributors:

• Miriam Maina, ACRC housing domain researcher
• Farouk Braimah, Accra housing researcher
• Alexandre Apsan Frediani, ACRC housing domain co-lead
• Alphonce G. Kyessi, Dar es Salaam housing researcher
• Joseph Macarthy, Freetown housing researcher
• Evance Mwathunga, Lilongwe housing researcher
• Basirat A. Oyalowo, Lagos housing researcher
• Ansumana Tarawally, Freetown research officer
• Abdulai Turay, Freetown research assistant
• Ola Uduku, ACRC housing domain co-lead

Header photo credit: Andrea Klingel. Roofing in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Reimagining: The essence of UTA-Do

Across the breadth and depth of the workshop sessions, unique in their format as well as content, arguably the most powerful of these was a visit to the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC). The visit included presentations and an overview of the movement’s history, covering events from the Centre’s creation to the police executions of local residents in response to supposed criminal activity in the Mathare settlement, with many unemployed youth becoming subjects of extra judiciary killings by state authorities.

Starting by documenting these crimes, the MSJC’s activity grew to incorporate various forms of resistance, including the Mathare Green Movement, which consisted of planting trees for victims of police crimes in the settlement, as well as a MSJC Kids Club, where children are mentored and schooled through fun activities designed to build their confidence and creativity. Other initiatives include the Matigari book club and Until Everyone is Free, a podcast series that uses the life and work of Kenyan freedom fighter, Pio Gama Pinto, to reflect on present realities and politics in Nairobi.

Equally inspiring and tuned to a similar tone of resistance, the Sound of Nairobi workshop session offered an alternative perspective to experiencing the city through the arts. Sound of Nairobi is an open access online archive, collection and portal of sounds from the city. The platform offers users an opportunity to upload their own sounds and listen to others in the portal, inviting them to consider how everyday audible experiences often go unnoticed, despite forming the essence of our city experiences. The portal draws people closer towards sounds that are often unheard, including silence as well as sound, considering how the city is shaped through sound and how different aspects of city life produce difference audible experiences. Ultimately, Sound of Nairobi functions as a living repository of urban sound, uplifting everyday experiences and voices through the arts in an alternative and inspiring way.

Workshop participants were also treated to an evening pre-screening of Kamirithu, a film documentation and history of the Kamirithu Educational and Cultural Centre – an open-air theatre in Limuru that was established by workers and residents fromKamiruthu village. The Kamirithu theatre is best known as the site where Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s critical play, Ngaahika Ndenda (“I will marry when I want”), was written, directed and initially performed in 1977. The play was subsequently halted by the then government, the centre banned from holding gatherings and events, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o arrested and detained. Kamirithu is narrated by original cast members, and centres on the establishment of the centre, the production and subsequent banning of the play, and the ultimate destruction in 1982 of the facility by authorities at the time.

The cast members share reflections on their own lives, presenting multifaceted pathways through which they came to use drama and music to protest and highlight challenges in their village, relating to land, dispossession, industrial environmental pollution and oppressive work environments. Framed against the play, these life histories offer a rich and nuanced reflection, not just of Kamirithu and Limuru town, but of Kenya’s complex histories of land and dispossession that continue to date. In this way, Kamirithu provided UTA-Do participants a view of how history also provided forms of activism – through drama, music and creative arts – that could be connected to new social justice centres that were organising to contest similar issues.

Offering another alternative perspective on how to think of the city was a contribution by Carl Nightingale, associate professor of urban and world history at the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo. Situating cities within the discussion on the Anthropocene, Carl joined the workshop in a hybrid session to present his book, Earthopolis. Carl covered the history of urbanisation of the world through perspectives on planetary urbanisation and discussed his ideas around realms of action, habitat, impact and consequence.

As the UTA-Do workshop drew to a close, with a celebratory dinner and party held in Nairobi and hosted by Sound of Nairobi, many of us shared our enthusiasm over the event itself, the inspiration we gained from the interactive sessions, lectures and talks, as well as our excitement about the potential of future collaborations and engagements with attendees near and far.

In the midst of exploring the challenges of doing as well as undoing, reimagining and unlearning, most of us found that in order to claim new perspectives and ways of thinking, old frameworks and narratives must be dismantled. Looking forward, this event set a precedent for future workshops that will undoubtedly be equally thought-provoking and inspiring in addressing the essence of UTA-Do.

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

Remaking the city from the margins

In addition to workshops and contributions focused on the materiality of development trajectories in African cities, the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop also included presentations that unpacked experiences of marginalisation – shedding light on subjective ways of reimagining the city, many of which remain peripheral within the field of urban studies.

Echoing some of the central theoretical considerations raised by Jethron Ayumbah on the various forms of UTA-Do, Sabatho Nyamsenda, a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, presented research on local and community-driven approaches to resistance in Dar es Salaam. Sabatho presented his research on labour informality in Tanzania, relating this to economic theories and framing of informal workers as entrepreneurs. Echoing back to Hernando de Soto’s conceptualisations of dead capital, Sabatho presented how informal workers in the UWAMATA Bus Drivers Association, the women of Manzese, and BodaBoda taxi drivers throughout urban Tanzania challenged the insecure working conditions they experienced in the face of formalisation.

A shared discussion on queering the city was led by Keguro Macharia, an independent scholar from Nairobi, and Eddie Ombagi, postdoctoral fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand. They extended the conversation around marginalised urban experiences. This complementary exchange covered historical and contemporary questions of queer urban subjectivities, and the intersections of gender and sexuality in the African city.

Referencing the city of Nairobi, Keguro proposed imagining the city through an abolitionist framework, where city dwellers are not policed but, rather, are allowed to enjoy and own the city as theirs. He provoked attendees to explore a thought process through which the city was viewed less as a space or mode of production, and more as a place continually in the process of becoming for all its residents. Similarly, in his description of Nairobi as a shot of whisky, Eddie underscored the value of temporality in the making and re-making of the city. Through this lens, time, change and continuous transformation become central elements in understanding queer urban lives in a context of social progress and movement towards inclusion and equality.

A hybrid lecture delivered jointly by Willie J. Wright, assistant professor at the University of Florida, and Adam Bledsoe, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, resonated with notions of reimagining the city from the margins, specifically through the lens of Black geographies. Introducing the origins of Black geography as a theoretical discourse emerging out of Black studies, Willie and Adam described race as a social and economic indicator located at the heart of how cities are experienced in the USA as sites of structural inequality. By challenging mainstream perspectives that dominate the discipline of geography, they highlighted the universality of Black geography to the experiences of black people everywhere. They also emphasised how a focus on Black experiences of education, housing and labour in the city exposes spatial dimensions of injustice otherwise unaccounted for. 

Revisiting the themes of defiance and transgression, a hybrid lecture from Gautam Bhan offered an elaborate understanding of the relationship between knowledge and activism. Gautam’s reflections on his experiences in Delhi resonated well with insights earlier shared by Jethron on the possibilities of collective action and antagonistic urban formations. Drawing attention to instances when the political becomes technical, Gautam reminded participants that in our roles as urban scholars, we should treat research as a political process.

Gautam led participants through the Indian Institute for Human Settlements’ experiences with what he termed the “demystification of the technical”, surmising the role of the scholar-activist as: bridging the political and the technical; engaging in the long durée of knowledge production which offers new language to the marginalised; producing research in alternative non-academic platforms; producing public archives; and challenging our own locations as scholar-activists. His counsel was for participants to be always conscious of the risk of depoliticising processes that are intrinsically political. This, he argued, can be done by always knowing when one is being used to shut the politics out and by a refusal to legitimise processes that seek to displace the political.

Adrian Wilson and Mario Schmidt put a spotlight on Nairobi as a place for scientific and political experiments, while noting the ethical problems that emerge from this. They observed the increased intrusion of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) into the cityscape to correspond with the turn towards evidence-based development aid. Identifying Nairobi as a key locus for these experiments, Adrian and Mario pointed out that Nairobians participate in RCTs and behavioural experiments which benefit mostly western scholars and local elites, while subjecting participants to substantial risks. They reminded participants of the heated debate that emerged following the publication of a paper by four economists, which was based on an RCT involving the disconnection of water services for inhabitants of Kayole in Nairobi over non-payment of water bills. According to Adrian and Mario, although many of these studies are presented as unproblematic, they often raise serious ethical questions and have damaging outcomes for the subjects.

Writing the African city

With plenty of opportunities to engage with fellow participants during the workshop, a number of sessions were designed specifically to bolster the budding skillsets of early career researchers in the room. Academic and non-academic participants were encouraged, through interactive and practical sessions, to reflect on how we could write the African city from diverse and multiple positionalities. In an interactive lecture, Amollo Ambole, a design researcher and lecturer at the University of Nairobi, shared her career path and journey as inspiration for participants to identify their own milestones and aspirations and to develop their own mission statements. Through this exercise, we were encouraged to understand our own journeys, strengths, accomplishments and trajectories as positionalities from which we could frame and shape our work, and direct our objectives and ambitions forward.

This self-reflective session was complemented by a working group activity led by Wangui Kimari on the diversity of methods used in studying the city. The session began by encouraging us to consider our positionality and the power dynamics that characterise our research context and relations. Using this, Wangui underlined how theory and positionality shape the ways in which data is collected, the particularities in the data that we concentrate on, and the importance of triangulating methods as a way of validating our research. Participants were then asked to identify unique methodological tools and approaches to research, and groups identified a range of tools, including group video analysis, sketch analysis and participant diaries. Attention was also given to the value of participatory action research and street phenomenology – or walking interviews – in underlining the relational nature of place in urban spaces, alongside other methods generally deemed conventional. This links back to the importance of collecting data in a non-extractive way – a key point raised by Jethron in his keynote lecture at the start of the workshop, who noted that “Africa needs to be treated as a source of knowledge, not as a source of data”.

Peter Ngau, associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Nairobi, also contributed to this discussion on research methodologies. Sharing his experiences of being an urban practitioner and activist, he also acknowledged the importance of publishing as part of an academic’s career trajectory. Similarly, Mary Lawhon, senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Edinburgh, gave a lecture on navigating the intricacies of writing journal articles and getting published. Mary shared experiences on the challenges and rewards of academic writing and offered valuable tips on framing, and claiming, specific theoretical discussions when designing academic papers. Workshop participants were also offered an opportunity to apply for a number of grants offered by the generous funders who made the UTA-Do Workshop possible (listed below). 

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Elizabeth Dessie, Miriam Maina and Smith Ouma

A different kind of space

The UTA-Do workshop offered space for a diverse range of urban thinkers and practitioners from Africa to meet, reflect and engage in dialogue and ideas from multiple positionalities and perspectives. There were at least 40 attendees from Angola, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, the UK and the USA, of varying ages, personal and professional backgrounds, disciplines and careers. A key achievement for the workshop was in creating a space and a forum for these African urban theorists to meet, learn, exchange and draw from these personal frameworks to contribute and enrich the programme. As participants, we were gifted with an unprecedented opportunity to bring our ideas, work, energy and experiences into connection with fellow thinkers and doers from across the continent – in fun and stimulating engagements – to grow from this encounter, and to forge connections for future collaboration.

The UTA-Do programme was structured to blend formal and informal interactions to enable co-learning, dialogue, fun, exchange, and to stimulate as well as challenge theoretical and methodological processes – highlighting the importance of generating new ways of thinking about and doing research on the African city. The programme included exclusive keynote presentations, guest speaker lectures, interactive hybrid sessions, thought-provoking working group discussions, field visits, reflection sessions, lunch and dinner events around the city, and a closing night party with Sound of Nairobi DJs.

Undoing the African city

Beginning with a thought-provoking keynote presentation by Jethron Ayumbah Akallah, lecturer at the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University, the workshop situated the principles of UTA-Do within discussions on the right to the city, who owns the city and how the city is experienced and perceived. Describing the roots of the UTA-Do concept – set in city dwellers’ resistance to the challenges posed by everyday urban life – Jethron described the temporality of cityness in many African contexts, where home often resides outside of the city, in rural areas as places of origin and de facto belonging.

Jethron referenced the works of David Harvey and Jennifer Robinson, among others, raising questions around the ways that the phrase UTA-Do can manifest: when doing becomes undoing, or doing differently; as a form of protest or defiance; or as a surrender to unchanging conditions. With many challenges in the lives of marginalised urban groups relating to a lack of service provision, Jethron emphasised the need to acknowledge existing, informal provisions of water or transport as a form of UTA-Do – of making and re-making the city – despite being off the grid. Informality as a type of cityness, then, becomes essential to the UTA-Do mentality and its perseverance.

Building on these reflections and contemplations, Wangui Kimari – social justice activist, anthropologist and participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), and part of ACRC’s safety and security domain team in Nairobi – led the first interactive session of the workshop around conceptualisations of southern urbanism. This saw participants discussing the meaning behind southern urbanism in relation to the Eurocentric vision of urbanity – exploring the different ways of framing what the city is and how where we are situated theoretically shapes how we see African cities. A key takeaway was the need to “write from within UTA-Do contexts”, rather than writing about them.

A lecture led by Liza Rose Cirolia, senior researcher at the African Centre for Cities and part of ACRC’s land and connectivity domain, delved into the material fabric of the urban, exploring the fundamental importance of infrastructure in understanding the present, as well as the future, of the African city. Drawing on a variety of examples, and contextualising the narrative within the SDGs and Agenda 2063 framework of developmental objectives, Liza’s lecture took a deep dive into unravelling how “writing and narrating a moment from infrastructure” can contribute to challenging, from outside the box, ideas of a single, fixed network of thinking about African cities.

Building on this conversation, Zhengli Huang, postdoctorate researcher at Tongji University, Shanghai, further advanced the discussion on infrastructure as the development project of many African cities through the lens of large-scale Chinese interventions. Drawing on examples such as the Nairobi Expressway and the Addis Ababa light rail transit system, Zhengli’s lecture elaborated on the impact of Chinese infrastructural investment in Africa’s urban development, while also touching on how these initiatives contribute to increasing debts among many recipient nations.

The discussion around China’s role in the infrastructural development of Africa continued with presentations by Andrea Pollio, research fellow at the African Centre for Cities and Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic of Turin, who also focused on the separate theme of the digital African city. Andrea presented his approach to viewing the city through a digital lens and shared some of the research challenges faced in researching a growing and increasingly digitalising African urbanity, including the visible–invisible nexus of data accessibility and reproduction.

Exploring the smart African city through the social implications of adopting ICT for basic service provision, Prince Guma, researcher in cities, infrastructures and technologies at the BIEA, shared his research into water infrastructures and technologies in Nairobi: a case study of Jisomee Mita (“read your meter”). This was a project designed to reconfigure water supply in the city by integrating low- to middle-income neighbourhoods in Nairobi, including Soweto-Kayole, into extended digitalised networks. Through his empirical findings, Prince highlighted how low-income communities mobilised in diverse ways to resist digitalised processes which had disempowering economic consequences. The research pointed to the nuances and complexities emerging from the rapid digitalisation of service provision in cities in Kenya and beyond.

UTA-Do | 2022 | Nairobi 

The inaugural UTA-Do African Cities Workshop was hosted in Nairobi at the British Institute in Eastern Africa. UTA-Do 2022 was conceptualised and convened by Wangui Kimari, Prince Guma and Liza Rose Cirolia.

The 2022 programme was made possible by the generous support of the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town), the British Institute in Eastern Africa, the Mathare Social Justice Centre, the University of Basel, the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, under the project “Examining nature–society relations through urban infrastructure” (project number: P19-0286:1), and the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations, under the MAC programme. 

For more information see: 

• Event page  
• Programme 

For information on future UTA-Do events, please contact Wangui (kuikimari@gmail.com) or Liza (liza.cirolia@uct.ac.za).

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

Tell us a bit about your background…

I was born in Nyeri, Kenya but I grew up in Nairobi. My training is in town planning, first at the University of Nairobi, and then at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have worked in urban and housing research organisations in Nairobi and Johannesburg, including the Centre for Urban Research Innovations at the University of Nairobi, the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa in Johannesburg, and the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

From my life in Nairobi and through working in these organisations, I have developed an interest and passion for African cities, and so my research focuses on the role of urban planning in shaping the development trajectory of African towns and cities.

How would you explain your research to a friend or family member?

I study towns and cities in Africa, focusing on housing, neighbourhoods and local economies. I try to understand how towns come together – where we live, where we work, where our children play and go to school, the markets where we buy our food, how we move from place to place.

I am interested in how all the different actors from governments, big and small investors, and we as city residents work together to create safe, beautiful and liveable spaces. As a town planner, I try to think about how we can use laws, policies and resources/funding to coordinate investments and produce towns and cities that are accessible to all.

What does your role within ACRC entail?

My role in ACRC is to provide support in the housing and human settlements domain. This involves coordinating the different city research projects, liaising with research teams in our cities. Our first phase of cities includes Nairobi, Freetown, Lilongwe and Accra. I am also working on my own research project on urban planning and nodal development in the Nairobi metropolitan project.

“I am excited about what we can learn across the different cities and focus areas that can support local efforts at advocacy or formulating workable policies and programmes.”

What are you finding most interesting about your work with ACRC so far? What are you most excited about?

The most interesting opportunity that the ACRC work has provided me is to understand how different towns and cities in Africa are developing. I am learning that the challenges facing housing and human settlements development are very similar across our cities, although there are specific differences in each city. I am excited about what we can learn across the different cities and focus areas that can support local efforts at advocacy or formulating workable policies and programmes.

The fellowship is also bringing together different researchers from across Africa, who are working on other domains, such as land and connectivity, informal settlements, urban safety and security, youth and capabilities, structural transformation, local and neighbourhood economies, and health, wellbeing and nutrition. I am very excited to participate in this multisectoral community, and I look forward to learning more from my fellow colleagues.

In fewer than five words, what one issue do you think needs to be prioritised to improve urban development in African cities?

Adapting and scaling-up local solutions.

What do you enjoy doing in your spare time?

A few things! I like to be outdoors, if the weather is nice, and I enjoy playing sports or learning a new sport. If I am indoors, I like drawing cartoons, reading books and comics, watching a nice sci-fi show, or playing video games. I also enjoy socialising with friends and family.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.

By Ola Uduku, Alexandre Apsan Frediani and Miriam Maina

A lack of adequate housing is one of the most prominent challenges facing urban Africa. Housing – whether in the form of informal or formal dwellings – is a basic human right, yet remains only an aspiration for most of Africa’s urban population.

Although Africa remains the least urbanised continent in the world, urbanisation is now growing at a faster rate in Africa than anywhere else on the planet. In 2015, more than 50% of the continent’s population lived in urban areas. This urbanisation process continues at an unprecedented pace, with predictions that by 2050, Africa’s cities will be home to an additional 950 million people.

Housing, human rights and wellbeing

Traditionally, the focus of housing research studies is on formal housing and upgraded informal settlements primarily as part of economic growth strategies. In contrast, within ACRC’s housing domain, we take a more holistic view of housing. We see housing as central to protecting human rights and to improving the wellbeing of low-income urban citizens. We intend to explore the qualitative and positive developmental processes that can be achieved through provision of access to, and the development of adequate housing at different scales – from  individual- to metropolitan- level planning. 

This is a different approach to current responses to housing, which focus on the need to provide mass low-cost structures that meet the bare minimum construction standards. Such developments often fail to recreate local community settings in which housing or shelter is part of a wider set of factors, resulting in improved health and wellbeing, vocational education and skills activities, which in turn link to locally based economic activities. 

Providing good housing has a number of cross-cutting objectives, from improving health and wellbeing, to contributing to local sustainable building construction value chains and strengthening urban infrastructure development. It is also clearly influenced by land and finance domains, overlapping significantly with informal settlements and other social development infrastructure, such as health and education networks.

Challenging traditional assumptions

In this way, ACRC’s housing domain team is challenging traditional housing assumptions. We are exploring sustainable construction processes and the housing delivery process from planning through to procurement value chains, and onto construction and acquisition processes. We will study individual exemplary houses, such as the Osae Addo and Lokko residences in Accra, Ghana.

Acknowledging the diverse and interlinked actors involved in housing production across the continent, we will also examine the role of non-conventional or traditional actors involved in housing design and delivery. These include women with limited formal education in supposedly “subordinate” roles (such as small-scale petty traders); and migrant communities who have set up local residential neighbourhoods, containing both formal and informal housing, and other infrastructure, such as schools, pharmacies and local shops, as found in refugee settlement areas in Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria. In addition, we will consider the often fluid relationship between the informal and the formal in African housing, considering what differences and continuum linkages there are between squatting, renting and home ownership.

Rights-based approach

Our vision is that the formal housing sector can be part of a multidisciplinary and multi-agency process through which Africa’s urban population has access to improved quality of life. We expect to have strong disciplinary linkages to research into land and connectivity, health and wellbeing, informal settlements, and the cross-cutting themes of gender and climate resilience and its effect on future house building and upgrading.  Conceptually, our focus is on exploring and developing our engagement with this rights-based approach to housing, from the individual- and community-led to private–state scales.

We are interested in how the formal housing sector might better link, and not simply overlap, with informal structures and processes to provide shelter. We will explore the potential for housing provision itself to link into local sustainable socioeconomic networks that create inclusive development and growth. We believe that there is a plurality of actors who are engaged in different modes and areas of housing production, at different scales and in different areas. This ecosystem is often non-formal and therefore overlooked, despite linking directly to and often underpinning the formal housing sector through its value and supply chain links, as is the case of cement procurement and distribution networks across much of Africa.

City-specific engagement

In our search for evidenced successful practice in other urban networks with similar challenges, we will undertake case study analyses of different forms of housing planning, design and delivery – across ACRC’s focus cities but also farther afield, including Latin America. We will be working closely with the consortium’s uptake teams on a city case basis, and hope to contribute to current urban policy development as it affects future housing planning in some of these cities.

In other cities, our engagement may be more with the procurement and design planning actors. Our role may be, for example, to challenge and advise on ways in which existing value chains might become more sustainable, work more to incorporate unrecognised actors, and become relevant to the future urban needs. 

Holistic urban development processes

Ultimately, we aim to use our research findings from the housing domain to provide new insights into how our understanding of housing can be expanded beyond its value as an economic resource, to being central to human rights. We aim to highlight the integral part housing must play in holistic sustainable urban development processes, and in enhancing wellbeing, particularly for the poor and lower-middle-income residents of Africa’s rapidly growing cities. We believe our case study approach is an essential way to spread and embed this information for Africa’s future urban actors, planners and protagonists.

Read more on the challenge of securing decent housing in Freetown.

Header photo credit: Ryan Faas / Getty Images. Housing in Kampala, Uganda.

Note: This article presents the views of the author featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the African Cities Research Consortium as a whole.

The African Cities blog is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means you are welcome to repost this content as long as you provide full credit and a link to this original post.